GOOGLE TRANSLATE OFFERS MASCULINE AND FEMININE TRANSLATIONS

In a conscious effort to reduce gender bias in its translations tool, Google has announced that the Translate will now offer both masculine and feminine translations for some languages.

For Hindi though, at the time of writing the story, we didn't see the support.

Essentially, with the change, Google Translate will now show both masculine and feminine translations of certain sentences and words that are gender-neutral in other languages.

For instance, now when you type “o bir doktor” in Turkish, you’ll now get both “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as the gender-specific translations. Up till now, Google Translate would skew masculine for words like “strong” or “doctor,” and feminine for other words, like “nurse” or “beautiful.”

Currently, the gender-specific translations are only available for translating single words from English to French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Turkish to English is the only language pair that provides both translations for sentences. Also, the feature is presently limited to the Google Translate tool on Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Google also shares that in the future, it aims to extend the gender-specific translation to other languages, and eventually also make it available on other platforms like iOS and Android apps.

Google also wants to add the gender-specific translation to features like query auto-complete.

In addition to that, Google writes in its blog, "We're already thinking about how to address non-binary gender in translations, though it’s not part of this initial launch."